[English text see below]

Eine Performance von Alexander Tuchaček unter Mitwirkung von Daniel Marti.

In dem Stück geht es um das Verhältnis von Körper und Schrift. Ein Verhältnis, das im Zeitalter digitaler Medien ein strittiger Raum ist. Digitale Medien greifen immer stärker und unsichtbar in unser Leben ein – und das mit dem Versprechen auf Freiheit und Selbstbestimmung und der impliziten Hoffnung auf das Delegieren von Mitbestimmung in den entkörperten Cyberspace. Die Arbeit geht von einer Textstelle von Jean-Luc Nancys Buch «Corpus» aus. Dieser Text wurde als Soundfile eingesprochen und kommt in dem Stück «unfolding agency: stategies of exscription #1» zur Neuaufführung. Ein Performer, Daniel Marti, wird über einen Bewegungsmelder ‚ein-ge-lesen‘ und steuert durch minimale körperliche Bewegungen eine maschinische Wiederaufführung der Audioaufnahme des Nancy-Textes. Ein maschinischer Textschreiber versucht, Laut für Laut dem körperlichen Sprechen zu folgen. Die geschriebenen Textzeichen überschreiben den Raum und den Performer. Im Stück geht es um diesen unsichtbaren, nichtsprachlichen Zwischenraum zwischen Schreiben und Geschrieben werden. Das Stück wird in 5 Szenen aufgeführt:

exscription vocabulary #1
1. scene: hold-interrupt / de-authenticate yourself / repeated deauthentication packet bursts to jam WiFi access points
2. scene: circle-invert / fly onionized / anonymize traffic with onion routing
3. scene: endure / thermal persistence / infrared cameras tracking living bodies
4. scene: stand-idle / uncloud the desire / ownCloud localizes data
5. scene: coincidentally-synchronous / infinitely foamy / tanzende Sterne gebären


[auf Deutsch siehe oben]

A performance by Alexander Tuchaček, performed by Daniel Marti.

The piece is about the relation between body and writing. A relation which, in the era of digital media, is a contested space. Digital media intervene more and more and invisibly into our life – with the promise of freedom and self-determination and the implicit hope of delegating participation into the disembodied cyberspace. The work builds on a passage from Jean-Luc Nancy’s book “Corpus.” This text was spoken and recorded to a sound file and reenacted in the piece “unfolding agency: stategies of exscription #1.” A performer, Daniel Marti, is ‘scanned’ via a motion detector and through minimal body movements directs a machinic restaging of the audio recording of Nancy’s text. A machinic text writer attempts to follow the bodily speaking sound by sound. The written text characters overwrite the space and the performer. The piece is about this invisible, non-language interstice between writing and being written. The piece is enacted in 5 scenes:


exscription vocabulary #1
1. scene: hold-interrupt / de-authenticate yourself / repeated deauthentication packet bursts to jam WiFi access points
2. scene: circle-invert / fly onionized / anonymize traffic with onion routing
3. scene: endure / thermal persistence / infrared cameras tracking living bodies
4. scene: stand-idle / uncloud the desire / ownCloud localizes data
5. scene: coincidentally-synchronous / infinitely foamy / tanzende Sterne gebären

4/5 December 2015

The second day of the symposium, on Saturday, 5 December, is taking place at Corner College.

On the occasion of Monica Ursina Jaeger’s solo show Future Archaeologies – Your Assumptions are my Memories at Christinger De Mayo, Zurich, we organise a guerrilla symposium to discuss the possibilities and problems of the “fiction as method – complex”.

Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.
From: Octavia E Butler: „A Few Rules for Predicting the Future“

When the Venice Biennale claims to discuss “All the Worlds Futures”, it becomes clear that the methodologies of fiction are no longer just part of the artistic practice, but also of curating, social science and global media.


http://www.muj.ch/Symposium


When the Venice Biennale claims to discuss “All the Worlds Futures”, it becomes clear that the methodologies of fiction are no longer just part of the artistic practice, but also of curating, social science and global media.

With accelerated globalization, the concomitant influence of digital culture and its accessible worlds of knowledge, within the last 25 years, disparate cultures, knowledge and art worlds have become interconnected and contemporaneous with each other. There are many co-existing ways of being in time and belonging to it. Thus, while being increasingly aware of being in the present, we are becoming attentive to other kinds of time. As a consequence, we seem to be living in an expanded present. But how far back – and forth – in time does the durational extension of our present reach?

The symposium brings together artists, curators, writers, critics and other voices to explore how fiction could be defined in regard to their practices, whether through the creation of fictional narratives, concepts fabricated around temporalities or the actual challenging of space-time relations.

Organized by artist Monica Ursina Jäger and curator/writer Damian Christinger.

Free entry, no booking required



Programme:

Friday 4 December

Venue: Christinger De Mayo, Ankerstrasse 24, 8004 Zurich

11.00-12.00 Session 1 Artist Talk and discussion: Monica Ursina Jäger in conversation with Kathleen Bühler (curator Kunstmuseum Bern)


Individual lunch



Venue: FRICTION, Nordflügel Gessnerallee, Gessnerallee 8, 8001 Zürich

13.00-13.30 Session 2 and discussion: Heiko Schmid, art historian / curator
13.45-14.15 Session 3 and discussion: Alexandra Navratil, artist
14.30-15.00 Session 4 and discussion: Sarah Zürcher, art historian/curator/critic
15.15-15.45 Session 5 and discussion: Emily Rosamond, artist

Break and informal discussion

19.45-20.45 Session 6 Art and Argument organised / chaired by Aoife Rosenmeyer
with: Daniel Blochwitz, Damian Christinger, Emily Rosamond, Eduardo Simantob


Break and informal discussion



Saturday 5 December

Venue: Corner College, Kochstrasse 1, 8004 Zurich

14.00-14.30 Session 7 and discussion: Eduardo Simantob, author and scenario writer
14.45-15.15 Session 8 and discussion: Stefan Zweifel, critic and curator
15.30-16.00 Session 9 and discussion: Dimitrina Sevova, curator / writer
16.15-16.45 Session 10 and discussion: Roger Buergel, Johann Jacobs Museum and Damian Christinger, curator/writer
17.00-17.30 Roundtable and Conclusions

Locations
Galerie Christinger De Mayo, Ankerstrasse 24, 8004 Zurich
FRICTION, Nordflügel, Gessnerallee 8, 8001 Zürich
Corner College, Kochstrasse 1, 8004 Zurich

Information and Contact
Fiction As Method Symposium Website
Damian Christinger, damian@christingerdemayo.com 079 253 45 28
Monica Ursina Jäger, monica@muj.ch 078 723 83 32

A group exhibition with

Denise Bertschi, Jackie Brutsche, Thomas Galler, Andreas Glauser, Andreas Marti, Nicolasa Navarrete, Sandra Sterle

From 09.12.2015 to 29.01.2016.
Opening on 9 December 2015, 19:00h.

At the opening
reading performance peace pills by Jackie Brutsche
and sound performance signal by BUG (Andreas Glauser and Christian Bucher).

With artist talks and parallel events (to be announced).

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova
Organized by Corner College

Opening hours:
Thu: 15:00h - 19:00h
Fri: 15:00h - 18:30h
Sat: 14:00h - 17:00h


[Deutscher Text unten]

The exhibition Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect displays a dystopian landscape produced by asymmetric relation of delirious realism and rigorous fiction in the time of global capital, with a certain sense of alienation, coldness and distance. It intensifies these affects and creates a space of reflection and a heterogeneous perceptual field that is simultaneously a close-range haptic space of proximity, on the backdrop of the recent mass media rhetoric announcing a new global crisis in which the world has never been closer to a New Cold War, a security crisis that escalates the fears of a future nuclear “option.” The exhibition inquires into some of these scenarios for the future from the past, and traces various historiographic lines or directions through the artistic practices and art works as seismographs of global social change. They sense the current symptoms “where everything is played in uncertain games, ‘front to front, back to back, front to back …,’ ”  as consequences of the politico-social and economic developments after WW II, and the so-called Cold War, a period of propaganda, technologization and militarization of civil life in the competition between Western and Eastern blocs. The segmentary forms of the fight for control and domination altered the North and South lines of longitude and deepened the gap between the so-called Third World and the Western or advanced technological-industrial societies with their current development of a knowledge and service based economy. The exhibition undermines the stereotypes produced by binary abstract machines that overcode the divisions into a homogeneous West and a homogeneous East, into the “rich” North and the “poor” South. It proposes rather other focal points as thresholds to the outside, through which the South can be thought as a new trajectory of knowledge, aesthetics and practices of critique of cultural, ideological and technological hegemony, from which can emerge new lines of resistance and the potentiality of new cooperations, as everybody has their own South with electric palm trees, not only geographic and economic but personal and political, too.

The participating artists, through their practices based on research, appropriation, poetic displacements and personal aesthetic reflections on memory, cognition, attention, mass media, territory and technologies critically interrogate the past/future tensions and give a passage to the present impossibility of isolation through securitization, militarization and ideological separations in order to increase the modes of connection. With the irony of the intellect, which is a qualitative duration of consciousness, the exhibition aims to intensify and empower movements of deterritorialization that fabulate and produce desires to repeat over and over again the melody of The Plastic Ono Band’s Give Peace a Chance, grasped as a cosmopolitical proposal for the upcoming winter – not a military machine, but a mutating living machine on which one can take a flight or just stay in bed.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova

You can find a longer curatorial text in full length as a PDF on our materials website.


[Englisch text above]

Die Ausstellung Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect (deutsch etwa: Kalter. Krieg. Heisse. Sterne/Stars. Der eherne/ironische Helm des Intellekts) zeigt eine dystopische Landschaft, produziert aus der asymmetrischen Beziehung eines berauschten Realismus mit einer rigorosen Fiktion in Zeiten des globalen Kapitals, mit einem gewissen Gefühl der Entfremdung, der Kälte und der Distanz. Sie intensiviert diese Affekte und begründet einen Reflektionsraum und ein heterogenes Wahrnehmungsfeld, das gleichzeitig auch ein haptischer Raum im Nahfeld ist, vor dem Hintergrund neuerer Medienrhetorik, die eine neue globale Krise ankündigt, in der die Welt noch nie so nah an einem Neuen Kalten Krieg sein soll, eine Sicherheitskrise, die die Ängste vor einer zukünftigen nuklearen “Option” anheizt. Die Ausstellung erkundet einige dieser Szenarien für die Zukunft aus der Vergangenheit und zeichnet durch die künstlerischen Praktiken und Kunstwerke als Seismographen globaler sozialer Veränderungen unterschiedliche historiographische Linien nach. Sie spüren die aktuellen Symptome, “wo sich alles in ungewissen Spielen abspielt, ‘von vorn nach vorn, von hinten nach hinten, von vorn nach hinten …,’ ”  aufgrund der politisch-sozialen und ökonomischen Entwicklung nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg und des so genannten Kalten Krieges, einer Periode der Propaganda, der Technologisierung und Militarisierung des zivilen Lebens im Wettlauf zwischen dem West- und dem Ostblock. Die segmentären Formen des Kampfes um Kontrolle und Vorherrschaft veränderten die nördliche und südliche Line der Längengrade und vertiefte den Graben zwischen der so genannten Dritten Welt und dem Westen bzw. den fortgeschrittenen technologisch-industriellen Gesellschaften mit ihrer derzeitigen Entwicklung einer wissens- und dienstleistungsbasierten Wirtschaftsform. Die Ausstellung untegräbt die Stereotypen, die von binären abstrakten Maschinen herrühren, die die Einteilung in einen homogenen Westen und einen ebenso homogenen Osten, in einen “reichen” Norden und einen “armen” Süden übercodieren. Sie schlägt vielmehr, als Schwelle zum Aussen, andere Schwerpunkte vor, durch die der Süden als neue Trajektorie des Wissens, der Ästhetik sowie der Praktiken der Kritik kultureller, ideologischer und technologischer Hegemonie, aus der neue Linien, aus welchen heraus neue Widerstandslinien und das Potential neuer Kooperationen auftauchen können, da jede_r ihren eigenen Süden hat mit elektrischen Palmen, nicht nur geographisch und wirtschaftlich sondern auch persönlich und politisch.

Durch ihre auf Forschung, Aneignung, poetischer Verschiebung und persönlicher ästhetischer Reflektionen über Erinnerung, Erkenntnis, Aufmerksamkeit, Massenmedien, Territorium und Technologien basierten Kunstpraktiken hinterfragen die teilnehmenden Künstler_innen kritisch die vergangenen/zukünftigen Spannungen und machen den Weg frei auf die gegenwärtige Unmöglichkeit der Isolation durch Sicherheitsmassnahmen, Militarisierung und ideologischer Auftrennung, um die Verbindungsmodi zu vermehren. Mit der Ironie des Intellekts, die einer qualitativen Dauer des Bewusstseins entspricht, macht sich die Ausstellung daran, Deterritorialisierungsbewegungen zu intensivieren und ermächtigen, die fabulieren und Begehren herstellen, immer von Neuem die Melodie von Give Peace a Chance von The Plastic Ono Band zu wiederholen, verstanden als kosmopolitischen Vorschlag für den kommenden Winter – nicht eine Militärmaschine, sondern eine mutierende lebendige Maschine, auf der man fliegen kann oder auch einfach im Bett bleiben.



Denise Bertschi

State Fiction



The project State Fiction is an exploration of the notion of Swiss neutrality, which utilizes the example of the Swiss ‹neutral› command in the Korean DMZ, which has been in operation since 1954 until the present. Bertschi has worked with material which has emerged from an investigation into a Swiss military archive of mostly self-representing documents about the life of Swiss soldiers during their mission in the DMZ. Her work interweaves found images and text-slogans into objects, which behold a sense of contradiction: they present both the feeling of the domestic and at the same time grotesque violence regarding the very geopolitical situation that these materials stem from.

Within the visual language used by the armed forces, Bertschi found a striking number of flower photographs, shot in a meticulously precise manner. Mobilizing a quiet and subtle tone, she questions the status of these images and what they tell us about the people who originally produced them.
The artist book STATE FICTION focuses on self-represented leisure activities of the DMZ command, photographed by Swiss personnel in the military camp located in the DMZ. The artist’s collection of these images questions the bizarre construction of ‹Little Switzerland› set within the militarized frontiers between North and South Korea.

Bertschi interprets neutrality as a sort of fiction, which forms the very identity of Swiss nationality and nationalism; meanwhile, being neutral is an extremely fragile state of being. ‹Helvetia Mediatrix› can be understood as a cover under which it leaves an open space for realities both unseen and unknown.

This project by Denise Bertschi is discussed by Nico Ruffo in the following article: http://www.srf.ch/kultur/kunst/schnappschuesse-aus-dem-koreanischen-sperrgebiet



Jackie Brutsche

UTOPEACE



In her latest work, UTOPEACE, developed in 2015 during a 3-week residency in Amsterdam, among other things the peace symbol of the "white dove" is staged variously as a heroin and as a quasi tragic figure.



Thomas Galler

American Soldiers



2012
Single channel video, color, stereo sound, 5:22

American Soldiers features a collection of cover versions of Toby Keith's American Soldier (USA/2003) based on appropriated footage, originally published on YouTube by Jeffery, Joe, Zack, Debbie, The Scillan Family, Colin, Patrizio, Tasia, Shanda, Stephany, Kathy and some unknown.



Andreas Glauser

Mladost 2



Audio / video installation, 2000.

« Das Wohngebiet Mladost 2 befindet sich ausserhalb des Stadtzentrums von Sofia und wird von Plattenbauten aus dem Sozialismus dominiert. « Mladost 2 » heisst übersetzt « Jugend 2 » . Dieses Wohngebiet, in welchem ich wohnte, inspirierte mich sehr. Eindrücke wie Stagnation, Verwilderung, Zerfall und Langeweile brachten mich dazu, die Fotografien als verschwommene, schwarz-weisse Videobilder nochmals in Erinnerung zu rufen. Die Videobilder werden von einer Audiospur, welche Rauschen und undefinierbare Geräusche zu einem dichten Netz verwebt, begleitet. Die Kombination von Bild und Ton spielt eine zentrale Rolle. »

« The neighborhood Mladost 2 lies outside the city center of Sofia and is dominated by prefabricated buildings from Socialist times. In translation, « Mladost 2 » means « Youth 2 » . This residential district, in which I lived, inspires me deeply. Impressions of stagnation, wilderness, decay and boredom brought me to recall the memory of the photographs as blurred, black-and-white video images. The video images are accompanied by a sound track that weaves noise and undefined sounds to a dense web. The combination of image and sound is key. »

Text: Andreas Glauser



Andreas Marti

Default Error




Changed Condition





Nicolasa Navarrete

Drawings



Thinking about the Cold War I started to (re)consider all the myths that were built about this conflict in our societies, a large part of which are still functional remnants of the subsequent historical defeat. Take for instance its own name: Cold War. Is it not an oxymoron? Can a war be cold? It was rather a hot war and I needed to go search for the myth that perfectly embodied this historic conflict. In a somehow Benjaminian endeavor, trying to unravel the threads on which these myths were constructed and that bind us to this imaginary past could be helpful to start rethinking about our past (building an alternative theory of the history that Benjamin call Historical materialism) and consequently about our future.

But again the impossibility to do it, only a text that refers to the text itself, as the story inside the story or the myth that appears in the myth. How I could grasp this historical past? The history is not a text, is fundamentally non-narrative and non-representational[...]However, the history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, the reality is; there is nothing but a text (1). And maybe there is not outside-text.

So then, how to be a genuine philosopher of the history?

How to be capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles,[...] with those of the present day? (bis) Maybe the only way to do so is through the history of the oppressor and oppressed, because the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles (bis). And finally, the text contain the key for understand “the text”. Inside-text.

(1) Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (NY: Cornell UP, 1981)

Text: Nicolasa Navarrete



Sandra Sterle

The Fortress of Utopia



2015, color, stereo, PAL, 28 min. Production Kazimir, HAVC Croatian Audio Visual Fund.

The Fortress of Utopia is an experimental short
 film set in the former military bases of the Island of Vis in Croatia. The remains of its impressive military architecture serve as a stage for performances through which the author explores the nostalgia of the socialist past and its future perspectives. Not approaching the history of Yugoslavia directly, but merging facts and fiction in a peculiar way, the author introduces personages of contemporary tourists and stylized figures from the past in the same time and space, emphasizing the nature of memory (both personal and collective) and decay.



BUG (Andreas Glauser & Christian Bucher)



Sound performance signal at the opening.

Andreas Glauser: Synthesizer and modulated mixing desk
Christian Bucher: Drums and percussion



Jackie Brutsche



Reading performance peace pills at the opening.

Presentation by the curators Bénédicte le Pimpec and Isaline Vuille, together with the artists Uriel Orlow and Riikka Tauriainen, of the exhibition project darker and darker grows the landscape (la possibilité d'une île), as guests at the Corner College exhibition Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect.


The three islands of the north are blocked with ice;
The finest theories refuse to make sense;
It is said somewhere a lake has collapsed
And dead continents rise back to the surface
-- Michel Houellebecq, The possibility of an island, 2005





The exhibition darker and darker grows the landscape (la possibilité d’une île) was organized last July by Bénédicte le Pimpec and Isaline Vuille at BAC – Bâtiment d’art contemporain in Geneva.

Most of the artists presented in the exhibition proceed by long-time investigation, whether in archives or on site, use anecdotes and details in order to set up new narratives. By focusing on human’s relations to nature and science, through the prism of botany, entomology, zoology and, more broadly, the natural sciences, they operate a change of focus and doing so they reveal wider contexts, they describe specific socio-political or historical situations.

After a short presentation of the exhibition project by the curators, Uriel Orlow will elaborate in a performance-lecture on his installation Grey, Green, Gold that enlightens a correlation between the history of a native South African plant and Nelson Mandela’s struggle against Apartheid. On her side, Riikka Tauriainen will do a performance-lecture updating on her research for her piece Contact zone that links together an Arctic expedition to the history of a major company and a science-fiction short story, and develops towards feminotopias and women travel writing.